The first post.
woman standing in a brown corn field looking sideways
Much of my creative life has been about overcoming the drive for perfection: this is not unique to me or any other artist. Yet this year has been a year of many fresh starts in my creative life, and wouldn’t you know it - Virgo rules my fifth house of creativity, pleasure, romance, and children. The recent Pisces/Virgo eclipse has me embodying a little less self-criticism, and I’ve been wanting to write - and share my writing - for years.
So, hi! My name is Meghan & welcome to my first blog post. These posts will be re-posted to substack for now, and you can sign up to receive my newsletter below. Thanks for being here.
I’m creating this collection of writing around the archetype of the priestess. My priestess-practice is pretty loose and low-key: it includes reading, writing, gardening, and making things (sometimes art but usually food and tea), as well as my work as a coach and counsellor. Through the mundane, I try to connect with what I find sacred and beautiful just about everyday. If I were to summarize what that means to me, I’d say:
Loving the Earth is as natural as breathing. I believe the Earth loves us back.
You’re enough and what we have here on Earth is enough. For everyone.
If we all realize we’re enough and that there’s enough, Empire would crumble.
I (seemingly randomly) read a post from Amanda Yates-Garcia yesterday. She wrote about the archetype of the priestess, who tends the sacred in the everyday. I would link it but now I can’t find it! She discussed how we do the mundane things in order to access the sacred, and how Virgo-coded the act of tending and keeping is. Now here we are, at the end of Virgo season and just post-Virgo eclipse, and I’m ready to share about the spiral priestess path I’ve been travelling on.
When I started exploring spirituality as an adult, yoga practice quickly became my healing mode of choice. There was some New Age reading mixed in there too, which I now find somewhat embarrassing. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I was grasping it as a lifeline. I’d been quietly drowning in stress, completing a French lit degree with undiagnosed ADHD, and had started spending weekends with my boyfriend and his hard-partying crowd. Writing papers in French was brain-busting work. I had too much of my identity and self-worth tied up in good grades, vague hopes of becoming successful, and increasingly my executive function was hitting its ceiling. That last year, I watched my dreams of career clarity go up in smoke, uncertain I’d survive another week of writing like I was trying to draw blood from a stone, let alone pursue a masters. I needed a little love and light at the time, because my over-developed skepticism, cynicism and nihilism, which I’d internalized trying to accomplish something important to me, had killed my creativity and was coming for me next.
The practices of yoga - especially hatha yoga - have been codified and decontextualized so many times over. As commercialized and commodified as it was how I encountered it, I feel profoundly lucky I did. I had an empathetic teacher who later became a mentor and friend. Newly 23, I was able to feel my emotions again. I spent a good many classes crying on my mat, drenched in sweat and wringing out the losses of my young life, alongside endless frustration in my relationship with my mom, an anxious-avoidant survivor.
It’s my tendency to take too much responsibility for things, but it’s important to note how yoga has been appropriated by the West. Yoga teacher trainers, when asked about cultural appropriation, say it’s an open tradition, and that yoga is meant to be shared.
I think that’s easy to say when you’re the one running the course… however, I tend to think (despite how easily this can spill over into enabling appropriation) that yoga itself and its past teachers wanted yoga live on, beyond the destruction and colonization wrought by the British, and despite the persecution of South Asians who were forbidden to practice their culture and spiritual traditions throughout colonization.
Grander complexities aside, beginning my yoga practice as a naive but already jaded 23 year old put me in touch with my inherent life force, allowing me to feel present in my body for the first time in over a decade. Because of my particular history, where I’m the illegitimate child of an absent father - and I felt the judgement and social exclusion my mother experienced at church from a young age - Eastern practices like yoga and its cultural zeitgeist in the mid-2000s were the only spiritual practices I’d learned about other than witchcraft which seemed available to me. To a young seeker, both witchcraft and yoga seemed untainted by the pervasive shame of not belonging, because as a misfit who would not go to church, I was unrecruitable to the evangelists I met. Now I see the irony of finding connection and freedom within a stolen, decontextualized and commodified tradition — it seems tragically ignorant. For me personally though, it was precisely because it seemed unconnected to the disembodied, patriarchal hypocrisy of church that after a single class, I held on to yoga for dear life.
I, who had never felt connected or welcomed at Sunday service, started to have a direct experience of something sacred, which I had never felt at church anyway.
That something sacred, much to my surprise, was me.
